I wrote this a while ago more as a personal creative project than anything related to my work (although it is related). But seeing as it’s Halloween, it felt right to put this out there.
[Tip: for extra spookiness, read while listening to this… ]
The Dark Feminine in Japanese Horror
A few months ago, I did something I hadn’t done for many years – I went to the cinema to see a horror movie.
Without spoiling the movie, The Curse of La Llorona reminded me immediately of some of the J-Horror films (horror movies from Japan) I’d seen. Like in many of the most popular J-Horror flicks, La Llorona’s monster wasn’t a snarling beast, a slimy alien or psychopathic cannibal, but a woman. Specifically, the ghost of a woman. And not an old, ugly witch. But the ghost of a beautiful bride.
The movie stayed with me. In fact, embarrassingly, it actually scared me.
A week later, having coffee with one of the men who attended a camping trip I lead in South-West England’s bleak and rather spooky Dartmoor, I shared an observation I made while watching the film;
“You know, if I’d heard the growl or roar of an animal while we lay there in our tents at night, or heard a group of men raiding our camp, I’d have been scared, but I’d like to think that I’d grab my knife, and get out of the tent with the mind of ‘Ok, we fight, maybe die. It sucks but what choice do I have?
But... If I’d been lying there, and heard the innocent giggle of a little girl, or a woman sobbing, while we lay there in the middle of nowhere, I’d probably grab that same knife and just kill myself with it!”
Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
We pondered over why it is that these symbols of the feminine are infinitely more terrifying than a classically ‘masculine type’ being when coupled with malevolence. In fact, I explored this quite a bit by myself, with a focus on the horror genre from Japan.
And that’s what this article is about.
Onryo
While La Llorona is not just a modern film but a folktale from Latin America dating back several hundred years, the film seems to have taken some artistic inspiration from such J-Horror movies as Ringu (The Ring) and Ju-On (The Grudge).
In these classic films from Japan (and their Hollywood re-makes), our bad guy is in fact a girl, an Onryo.
Onryo, from Japanese folklore, are ghosts capable of causing harm to us here in the realm of the living. They are often portrayed as having their long, straight black hair (as you’d expect from that part of the world), hanging down.
In ancient Japan, where women’s hair was always tied up, this free-hanging of their locks not only reflected the look of the dead (as hair was let down on the corpses of those who had passed away), but perhaps represents something all the more terrifying.
In the male-dominated society of ancient Japan, etiquette - order - was everything. In such an environment, what then could be more unnerving than the chaos of disobedience?
Counter to the ugliness associated with ‘monsters’, the hair often fully or partially covered the otherwise attractive face on the Onryo. While her skin may be a ghostly white, or her eyes blackened, our monster is almost always unmistakably a girl who was, and vaguely still is, attractively feminine – which somehow makes her all the more unsettling.
It’s interesting to note that the name of the Onryo in Ringu is Sadako, translated into English as ‘chaste girl’ (sada: chaste, ko: girl), which speaks to the innocence and therefore harmlessness that has somehow become corrupted in our female monster. Sweetness gone wrong.
The Grudge 3 (2009)
Perhaps just as notable about these J-Horror monsters as their surface-appearance is the way in which they move. Inspiration is taken from Butoh, a form of dance born in Japan shortly following the end of WWII – a war which for Japan, ended in true horror.
Before becoming known as Butoh, the style has been referenced by its founder as "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊, ‘dance of darkness’) which fits perfectly with the notably erratic, unrhythmic, unearthly and creepy movements that typify Butoh.
Butoh Performance (click for image source)
More than just a creepy way of moving, Butoh performances often broached taboo subjects that again have an undertone of challenging order through the threat of chaos. Just as Godzilla is the repressed post-nuclear masculine-fury of Japan, Butoh is arguable its feminine-rage counterpart.
If there was ever a piece of art that could encapsulate the silent and lifeless landscape that was left of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is Butoh.
Water
Unlike the blood and gore of many a Western horror film, horror from Japan – and so too in The Curse of La Llorona – uses an entirely different visual to chill the audience to the bone; water. In fact, one popular J-Horror movie is pretty much about water; the aptly named Dark Water.
Forget flying furniture, blood flowing down the walls or the fires of hell, somehow the drip, drip, drip of water can carry the presence of evil far deeper into the minds of the audience.
In normal life, when you discover water where there shouldn’t be – a leak in the ceiling or water seeping from the cupboard under the sink – we are filled with a mild dread. Where there is a bit of water, there is often a lot more that we can’t yet see, slowly but surely causing damage. And as any home insurance loss-adjuster will tell you, water causes more damage than fire.
And it’s this insidious nature of water that we fear when we find a leak at home, or when watching a horror movie, the character in the scene encounters a random puddle in the middle of the hallway, and there is silence save for the ominous drip, drip, drip. The camera pans upward with painful slowness as the character looks up to see where the drip is coming from, only to find something, someone, crawling silently along the ceiling with hair hanging down, moving like a spider with broken legs.
Water isn’t just a substance, but an element. It is eternal. Water is the source of life, the flowing river and the currents of the sea. But it is also the pond, the puddle, the swamp. When it stagnates, it becomes poisonous and brings death. Bad water kills over 3 million people a year according to the World Health Organisation.
The Godai – the five elements (earth, water, wind, fire, space) - is a central framework of understanding reality that runs through the Japanese psyche, even today. Each element has its own unique quality that can be seen in various ways, including having a place in psychology. Water, in human beings, is thought to be characterised by sensitivity and mood-changeability. When held in excess it stagnates and becomes the poison of unconscious anger.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Onnen
A common theme with our feminine monsters is that they once resided in the world of the living - an innocent girl or a happy bride – until something goes dreadfully wrong, at which point their grief is turned inward, absorbed, and rots along with their corpse into an anger so deep that it becomes pure evil.
The Ring (2002)
Onnen is the term used in Japan to describe a resentment or grudge (ju-on) that is so powerful that it carries on after the death of the one who holds it.
Our female monsters speak to the collective feminine wound; the wound of oppression and of having love denied or taken away. This wound is a global wound, but Japan, with its history of enforcement of hyper-obedience in its women, where the part of Woman that loves to love wildly has been shamed and shut down, has found a powerful way to express it through cinema.
In Closing
If we look into many philosophical schools of thought, including the Japanese tantric traditions, The Masculine is thought to be order and direction. And when wielded unconsciously, detached from the heart, it manifests as oppression and the denial of The Feminine.
The Feminine is nature, which is change. It is energy, which is life-force. The unconscious feminine then, detached from wisdom, is changeability to the point of chaos. It is not only the birth-phase of life, but the complete cycle, including destruction.
The Feminine is in fact love. And Feminine rage is always because love has been denied – denied to be given, denied in being received.
image source: unsplash.com
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